Instagram readying Snapchat competitor in the form of ‘Bolt’

Snapchat’s incredible popularity has its competitors scrambling to come up with an equivalent service to engage the masses. Despite several attempts, no one has really managed to match Snapchat’s success.

After failing to acquire Snapchat, Facebook came up with the godawful Slingshot app, which I’m sure even Facebook employees aren’t using at this point, leave alone the average users. But Facebook has an ace up its sleeve in the form of Instagram, and so now they are using Instagram’s popularity to take on Snapchat.

Enter Bolt. What is Bolt? A one tap photo messaging service from Instagram. Or at least that’s what the message that appeared prematurely on a few people’s Instagram app said, even through the service hasn’t been officially announced yet.

It remains to be seen how Bolt’s implementation is going to be. One thing Bolt has going for it is that it comes from Instagram, which is a lot more popular among the Snapchat crowd than Facebook, at least in terms of how cool it is. Either way, Facebook’s ‘acquire or rip-off’ business strategy is rather off-putting.